On “Silk”
Since I invented the term, I guess I should define it.
The following definition is personal, and it’s the only definition that matters to me. I don’t care what other people have come to mean by it.
No, it’s not “Asian-flavored steampunk.” No, it’s not “Asian-influenced fantasy.” No, it’s not …
It’s a very specific technology and literary aesthetic. Let me explain:
As I wrote the Dandelion Dynasty, a grand tale of both technology and magic, melding past-reinterpretation with future-hopecrafting and drawing on literary traditions from around the world, I struggled to describe the book to people.
“Silkpunk” was the shorthand I coined to describe the technology aesthetic I wanted for the Dandelion Dynasty series, as well as the literary approach I used in writing the books.
In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by W. Brian Arthur’s idea of technology as language. The engineer’s task is much like that of a poet: the engineer must creatively combine existing components to solve novel problems, thereby devising artifacts that are new expressions in the technical language.
In the silkpunk world of my novels, this view of technology is dominant. The vocabulary of the technology language relies on materials of historical importance to the people of East Asia and the Pacific islands: bamboo, shells, coral, paper, silk, feathers, sinew, etc. The grammar of the language puts more emphasis on biomimetics–the airships regulate their lift by analogy with the swim bladders of fish, and the submarines move like whales through the water. The engineers are celebrated as great artists who transform the existing language and evolve it toward ever more beautiful forms.
Similarly, the literary approach itself mixes and matches elements from diverse global literary traditions I feel at home in, and tropes and techniques from East Asian historical romances are deliberately juxtaposed with elements from Western epic narratives. The text itself reflects the same poet-engineer mindset. The Aeneid, Records of the Grand Historian, Paradise Lost, Beowulf, Han Dynasty poetry … all served as sources of inspiration, re-invented and re-purposed to tell a brand-new tale.
On “Punk”
Now, the “-punk” suffix. As I use it, it’s functional; in fact, it’s more important than the “silk” part.
The silkpunk novels are about rebellion, resistance, re-appropriation, and rejuvenation of tradition, and defiance of authority, key “punk” aesthetic pillars. And in my case, they’re about reconceiving our foundational mythology, the national narrative of what it means to be American.
It’s very common in the US to use allusions to Roman history when discussing American politics. For example, the Founding Fathers gave themselves Roman names; our smaller legislative body is named “the Senate” and debates in a “Capitol”; America often views itself as “another Rome”; and when former President Trump contemplated a coup via riot, his followers actually called it his “Rubicon” moment …
It is also very common in the US to use allusions to European history to discuss American politics: comparisons between Britain and the US, the legacy of European religious persecution, European conceptions of the relationship between sovereigns and subjects…
A lot of this has to do with the constructed narrative of “Western Civilization” in general, which views Rome as the founding mythology for all Western empires that came after (British, German, American …), but some of it is also uniquely tied up with America’s own founding mythology, which looks to Rome as the example par excellence of a republic, even an Imperialistic republic that dominated “uncivilized peoples” to boot. Europeans, as the violent colonizers of America, are seen as the “natural” models from which to draw visions of America’s own national myth.
But over time, this narrative has become ossified and toxic, especially when white supremacists begin to invoke Rome and Europe to justify their absurd racial theories. America’s founding mythology became twisted to serve the notion that the US was and is a white ethnostate, and that white supremacy is the natural state of affairs in the US. I can’t tell you how often people abroad show in ways big and small that they have bought into this vision and think of America as a “white” nation.
This is, of course, all ridiculous. America has never been and isn’t now a white nation. You cannot simply erase the contributions of the Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and all other non-white peoples. There is no reason to accept the myth of the colonizer and enslaver as everyone’s myth. Much of the instability in contemporary US politics has to do with this national reckoning, this struggle to re-constitute the story of America to account for voices that have historically been excluded, erased, silenced, enslaved, deprived of citizenship, driven out of the land. This is how America’s living constitution is amended – not via technocratic changes to some piece of paper, but a wholesale re-imagining of the story of America. (For example, think about Hamilton, which uses nonwhite actors to portray the Founding Fathers).
I decided that I wanted to write a new epic fantasy that would sketch out how an inclusive, inspiring, just national mythology could be constituted and then re-constituted for a people much like the Americans (in this case, the people of Dara), a diverse people dealing with injustice, prejudice, colonialism, threats domestic as well as foreign. But instead of using Rome or Britain as the mythological foundation, I would use Qin-Han China.
I should make it clear from the start that my epic fantasy series has almost nothing to do with Chinese history. The Dandelion Dynasty isn’t about the Chu-Han Contention, no more than the Federalist Papers were about Roman politics. The background of the Chu-Han Contention is mined for political, philosophical, and cultural symbols that could then be used to re-formulate the American founding story, just as the Founding Fathers and many others since then have mined Roman and European history for political, philosophical, and cultural symbols that could be used to re-constitute the American story.
Why should Rome be synonymous with America? Why must stories about constitutions and republics be limited to European models? Why can’t a new set of historical-political stories be used to enrich how we can tell the story of America?
As far as I know, no one has done anything like this, but Qin-Han China is actually a very interesting mythological model for America. Qin-Han China sought to forge a unitary state from disparate city-states with long, separate cultural and political identities; early America sought to forge a federal state from a collection of distinct colonies with their own histories. Qin-Han China struggled with political legitimacy and the efficiency of central administration; early America struggled with political legitimacy and the scope of central authority. Qin-Han China had to deal with the outsized impact of its founding figures in a new dynasty; Early America faced the same issue. In both cases, the constitutive acts of early figures set important precedents that became part of the nation’s narrative.
The reality is: we give too little credit to the ancients. Many of the problems that we think are unique to modernity were also problems that the ancients had to face: How do you rein in a self-aggrandizing bureaucracy? How do you keep in check an elite class that seeks its own benefit at the cost of the commonwealth? How do you ensure that foreign forces don’t take advantage of fighting between factions among the domestic ruling class? How do you ensure the just distribution of resources among competing classes, ethnicities, interest groups? How do you teach a version of history that everyone can agree on? These were problems in ancient Rome, in Han Dynasty China, in the Aztec Empire, and in contemporary America – and we’re all richer when we can see across time and space and use historical parallels to tell better stories.
I wasn’t interested in “re-telling” history; I was interested in re-using the components of history to tell a brand-new story, a new story that could then delve into how to deal with injustice, exclusion, conquest, enslavement, the sins of history. History does not provide us with perfect answers, but fantasy can help us see new possibilities.
Because what I was doing was so new, I couldn’t count on readers to understand it without help. If I were using Rome to tell a story inspired by America, I could assume that most of my readers would know Roman history. But because I was using Qin-Han Chinese history as the foundation for a story about America, I couldn’t count on most of my readers to know it. (This is also, in part, why the first book in the series had to spend so much time just building up the background lore that could then be used in subsequent volumes.) If I were using a fantasy land modeled on Britain to talk about the constitutional revolution in America, many of my readers would have been able to see what I was doing, but because I was using Chinese models, some readers couldn’t look past the “Chinese-ness” of the unfamiliar story, and they couldn’t apply the insights to America, whose constitutional crisis and narrative were what I was engaging with.
But I refused to change my approach. I’m stubborn like that. To use symbols and ideas from Chinese history to tell an epic fantasy about America is my way to broaden the American tapestry, to forcefully insert myself into the American chorus. For too long, immigrants in the US have accepted the white supremacist narrative, believed that whiteness has a greater claim on Americanness. I don’t. Just as Hamilton used actors of color to rewrite the American founding story, I’m going to use Chinese legends and Chinese historical imagery to re-imagine America for the future. The colonized need not accept the colonizers’ vision – this is the “punk” part of silkpunk.
Looking Back
The story that I ended up writing is not the story I set out to write. Over these ten years, I watched my daughters grow up, changed jobs twice, and traveled around the world. Companies that didn’t even exist in 2010 now dominate the global conversation. Threats that I didn’t even have names for now haunt me. People I loved died. A pandemic didn’t just kill hundreds of thousands of people, but also dealt a body blow against the dream of a world with more ploughshares than swords. My entire way of understanding the world has been upended, taken apart, and then reconstructed, like a shack on the side of the highway outside Cape Town built from pieces of broken airplane wings, reappropriated, reoriented, repurposed, yes, but above all, resilient and re-filled with hope.
I’m no longer the same writer as when I started this series. It would be very odd indeed for the story to be independent of an author who has changed so much. What began as “just a fun fantasy story about a land called Dara where engineers play the role of wizards and are celebrated like poets” turned into a way for me to work out the relationship between good stories and lasting institutions, to think about what it means to be American, to be a Chinese in the diaspora, about constitutionalism and national mythologies, about the power of technology as a kind of poetry. It is, like all stories that make their creators proud, about a deeply personal journey.
The story remains full of hope and light, and an abiding faith in the power of ordinary human beings to rise to the occasion and do extraordinary things. For no matter how my life has changed, my center has held.
Additional Reading:
- I wrote a discussion on silkpunk in the Dandelion Dynasty as a meditation on American modernity for FanFiAddict.
- Emily Xueni Jin wrote about her view of silkpunk as cosmopolitan writing in the age of decolonization for Sixth Tone.